Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here.
Tech’s guiding principles these days aren’t too difficult to find: discipline, focus and cash conservation. But I’ve always found those same focuses to be especially in conflict with what it means to be an early-stage founder pitching your vision: You have to have Elon Musk-level ambition, big dreams and the ability to sell a company to investors before there are any real metrics behind it.
In some ways, it’s the job of the investor to see the reason to say yes anyway. In other ways, the downturn is very much making early-stage founders professionalize sooner and sooner; philosophically looking more like t...
